Bland Fanatics: Liberals, Race, and Empire

By Pankaj Mishra

A wide-ranging, controversial collection of critical essays on the political mania plaguing the West by one of the most important public intellectuals of our time.

In America and in England, faltering economies at home and failed wars abroad have generated a political and intellectual hysteria. It is a derangement manifested in a number of ways: nostalgia for imperialism, xenophobic paranoia, and denunciations of an allegedly intolerant left. These symptoms can be found even among the most informed of Anglo-America.

In Bland Fanatics, Pankaj Mishra examines the politics and culture of this hysteria, challenging the dominant establishment discourses of our times. In essays that grapple with the meaning and content of Anglo-American liberalism and its relations with colonialism, the global South, Islam, and “humanitarian” war, Mishra confronts writers such as Jordan Peterson, Niall Ferguson, and Salman Rushdie. He describes the doubling down of an intelligentsia against a background of weakening Anglo-American hegemony, and he explores the commitments of Ta-Nehisi Coates and the ideological determinations of The Economist. These essays provide a vantage point from which to understand the current crisis and its deep origins.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Oct 6, 2020
• ISBN: 9780374711900

Pankaj Mishra

Pankaj Mishra was born in North India, in 1969. He writes for the New York Review of Books, the New Statesman, Granta , the Times Literary Supplement and the Guardian.

Book preview

Introduction

I Want Everyone to Become an American

Thomas Friedman

Someday we must write the history of our own obscurity – manifest the density of our narcissism

Roland Barthes

The essays in this book were written in response to the Anglo-American delusions that climaxed in Brexit, the election of Donald Trump and, finally, a calamitous response to the COVID-19 outbreak. These range from the nineteenth-century dream of imperial-era liberalism long championed by the Economist, in which capital, goods, jobs and people freely circulate, through Henry Luce’s proclamation of an ‘American century’ of free trade and ‘modernisation theory’ – the attempt by American Cold Warriors to seduce the post-colonial world away from communist-style revolution and into the gradualist alternative of consumer capitalism and democracy – to the catastrophic humanitarian wars and demagogic explosions of our times.

‘Among the lesser culprits of history’, Reinhold Niebuhr wrote in 1957, at the height of the Cold War, ‘are the bland fanatics of western civilization who regard the highly contingent achievements of our culture as the final form and norm of human existence.’ For Niebuhr, the bigger culprits of history were, of course, communists and fascists. A dedicated anti-communist, the American theologian was vulnerable to phrases such as ‘the moral superiority of Western civilization’. Nevertheless, he could see the peculiar trajectory of liberalism: how ‘a dogma which was intended to guarantee the economic freedom of the individual became the ideology of vast corporate structures of a later period of capitalism, used by them, and still used, to prevent a proper political control of their power’. He was also alert to the fundamentalist creed that has shaped our age – that Western-style capitalism and liberal democracy will be gradually generalised around the world, and every society, in short, ought to evolve just as Britain and the United States did.

Of course, Niebuhr could not have anticipated that the bland fanatics who made the Cold War so treacherous would come to occupy, at its end, history’s centre stage. Incarnated as liberal internationalists, neocon democracy promoters and free-market globalisers, they would blunder through a world grown more complex and intractable, and help unravel large parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America before sowing political chaos in their own societies.

The global history of the post-1945 ideologies of liberalism and democracy, or a comprehensive sociology of Anglo-America and Anglo- and America-philic intellectuals, is yet to be written, though the world they made and unmade is entering its most treacherous phase yet. Most of us are still only emerging, bleary-eyed, from the frenetic post–Cold War decades when, as Don DeLillo wrote, ‘the dramatic climb of the Dow and the speed of the internet summoned us all to live permanently in the future, in the utopian glow of cyber-capital’.

But it has long been clear that the global wager on unregulated markets, and military interventions on behalf of them, were the most ambitious ideological experiments undertaken in the modern era. Their adepts, allies and facilitators, from Greece to Indonesia, were also far more influential than their socialist and communist rivals. Homo economicus, the autonomous, reasoning, rights-bearing subject of liberal philosophy, came to stalk all societies with some fantastical plans to universally escalate production and consumption. The vernacular of modernity coined in London, New York and Washington, DC, came to define the common sense of public intellectual life across all continents, radically altering the way in which much of the world’s population understood society, economy, nation, time and individual and collective identity.

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Of course, those trying to look beyond the exalted rhetoric of liberal politics and economics rarely found any corresponding realities. My own education in this absence began through an experience of Kashmir, where India, billed as the world’s largest democracy, descended into a form of Hindu supremacism and racist imperialism of the kind it liberated itself from in 1947. I went to the valley in 1999 with many of the prejudices of the liberal Indian ‘civiliser’ – someone who placidly assumed that Kashmiri Muslims were much better off being aligned with ‘secular’, ‘liberal’ and ‘democratic’ India than with the Islamic state of Pakistan.

The brutal realities of India’s military occupation of Kashmir and the blatant falsehoods and deceptions that accompanied it forced me to revisit many of the old critiques of Western imperialism and its rhetoric of progress. When my critical articles on Kashmir appeared in the year 2000 in the Hindu and the New York Review of Books, they were attacked at home most vociferously by self-styled custodians of India’s ‘liberal democracy’ rather than by Hindu nationalists. I had come up against an influential ideology of Indian exceptionalism, which claimed moral prestige and geopolitical significance for India’s uniquely massive and diverse liberal democracy.

Many of those righteous notions reeked of upper-caste sanctimony and class privilege. Piously invoking the ‘idea of India’, the country’s experiment with a secular and liberal polity, the fetishists of formal and procedural democracy seemed unbothered by the fact that people in Kashmir and India’s north-eastern border states lived under de facto martial law, where security forces had unlimited licence to massacre and rape, or that a great majority of the Indian population found the promise of equality and dignity underpinned by rule of law and impartial institutions to be a remote, almost fantastical, ideal.

For decades, India benefited from a Cold War-era conception of ‘democracy’, which reduced it to a morally glamorous label for the way rulers are elected, rather than for the kinds of power they hold, or the ways they exercise it. As a non-communist country that held routine elections, India possessed a matchless international prestige despite consistently failing – worse than many Asian, African and Latin American countries – to provide its citizens with even the basic components of a dignified existence. The halo of virtue around India shone brighter as its governments embraced free markets and communist-run China abruptly emerged as a challenger to the West. Even as India descended into Hindu nationalism, an exuberant consensus about India was developing among Anglo-American elites: that liberal democracy had acquired deep roots in Indian soil, fertilising it for the growth of free markets.

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For a writer of my background, it became imperative to challenge this unanimity – first at home, and then, increasingly, abroad. In many ways, India’s own bland fanatics, who seemed determined to nail their cherished ‘idea of India’ into Kashmiri hearts and minds, prepared me for the spectacle of a liberal intelligentsia cheerleading the war for ‘human rights’ in Iraq, with the kind of humanitarian rhetoric about freedom, democracy and progress that was originally heard from European imperialists in the nineteenth century.

It had long been clear to me that Western ideologues during the Cold War absurdly prettified the rise of the ‘democratic’ West. The long struggle against communism, which claimed superior moral virtue, had required many expedient feints. The centuries of civil war, imperial conquest, brutal exploitation and genocide were suppressed in accounts that showed how Westerners made the modern world, and became with their liberal democracies the superior people everyone else ought to catch up with. What I didn’t realise until I started to inhabit the knowledge ecosystems of London and New York is how evasions and suppressions had resulted, over time, in a massive store of defective knowledge about the West and the non-West alike. Simple-minded and misleading ideas and assumptions, drawn from this blinkered history, had come to shape the speeches of Western statesmen, think tank reports and newspaper editorials, while supplying fuel to countless log-rolling columnists, television pundits and terrorism experts.

It may be hard to remember today, especially for younger readers, that the mainstream of Anglo-America in the early 2000s deferentially hosted figures like Niall Ferguson, and arguments that the occupation and subjugation of other people’s territory and culture were an efficacious instrument of civilisation, and that we needed more such emancipatory imperialism to bring intransigently backward peoples in line with the advanced West. Astonishingly, British imperialism, seen for decades by Western scholars and anti-colonial leaders alike as a racist, illegitimate and often predatory despotism, came to be repackaged in our own time as a benediction that, in Ferguson’s words, ‘undeniably pioneered free trade, free capital movements and, with the abolition of slavery, free labour’.

Never mind that free trade, introduced to Asia through gunboats, destroyed nascent industry in conquered countries, that ‘free’ capital mostly went to the white settler states of Australia and Canada, and that indentured rather than ‘free’ labour replaced slavery. The fairy tales about how Britain made the modern world weren’t just aired at some furtive far-right conclave or hedge funders’ luxury retreat. Mainstream television, radio, and the broadsheets took the lead in making them seem intellectually respectable to a wide audience. Politicians as well as broadcasters deferred to their belligerent illogic. The BBC set aside prime time for Niall Ferguson’s belief in the necessity of reinstating imperialism. The Tory minister for education asked him to advise on the history syllabus. Looking for a more authoritative audience, the revanchists then crossed the Atlantic to provide an intellectual armature to Americans trying to remake the modern world through free markets and military force.

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Of course, the bards of a new universal liberal empire almost entirely suppressed Asian, African and Latin American voices. And the very few allowed access to the mainstream press found that their unique privilege obliged them to, first of all, clear the ground of misrepresentations and downright falsehoods that had built up over decades. This often frustrating struggle defined my own endeavour, reflected in the pages that follow.

It was hard to avoid, for the prejudices were deeply entrenched in every realm of journalistic endeavour, looming up obdurately whether one wrote about Afghanistan, India or Japan. To give one example: In Free to Choose, a hugely influential book (and ten-part television series), Milton and Rose Friedman had posed a seductive binary of rational markets versus interfering governments (what came to underpin World Bank and International Monetary Fund reports, policies and prescriptions for the next two decades). Friedman, who inspired the ‘Chicago Boys’ re-engineering Chile’s economy after the CIA ousted Salvador Allende in 1973, sought intellectual vindication in East Asia, claiming that Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore had succeeded owing to their reliance on ‘private markets’. In The End of History and the Last Man, Francis Fukuyama echoed this assertion, arguing that East Asia’s economies, by ‘repeating the experience of Germany and Japan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, have proven that economic liberalism allows late modernizers to catch up with and even overtake’ the West.

This fable about the East Asian ‘miracle’, then, became central to mainstream reporting about Asia. It did not tally at all with the historical record, which showed that state-led modernisation and economic protectionism were as central to the economies of pre-war Japan and Germany as to post-war East Asia; more recently, the long traditions of technocratic governance in East Asia have proven crucial to its relatively successful response to the coronavirus pandemic while Anglo-American free-marketeers lethally flounder. But such facts about ‘state intervention’, as blithely ignored in the New York Times as in the Economist and the Wall Street Journal, seemed to engage very few people.

Of course, the fables about free markets just happened to match the efforts of the World Bank, the IMF and other institutions of international economic management, whose priorities of poverty alleviation and public sector development had given way by the early 1980s to privatisation, trade deregulation, the reduction of price subsidies and relaxation of limits on foreign investments. By the time the Soviet Union imploded and an army of Americanisers invaded Russia, the free-marketeers were emboldened enough to think they had the power, as in Reagan’s favourite line from Thomas Paine, ‘to begin the world over again’. Saul Bellow, writing to a friend in 1992, warned that ‘the free-market economic theorists have done too well. They have taught the country that laissez faire won the cold war’. The aggressive promotion of a new form of what Albert Hirschman called ‘mono-economics’ was accompanied by the breathtaking conceit that the fall of communism had inaugurated a benignly post-ideological age. As it turned out, those hoping to begin the world over again by administering economic shock therapy to Russia were not disappointed. Living standards collapsed; Russia suffered a severe mortality crisis, resulting in millions of additional male deaths in the 1990s; and the crime rate skyrocketed – a series of disasters that culminated in the destruction of the rouble and bankruptcy in 1998.

Having planted their flag over the Kremlin, the crusaders were eyeing new conquests around the world. By the late 1990s, there were many powerful and wealthy sponsors of the Washington consensus that was being imposed on Latin America, Asia and Africa. New centres of intellectual and political authority had emerged in American universities, business schools and philanthropic foundations. Non-Americans rose to senior positions in American-dominated international institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF. Today, right-wing think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute and the Peterson Institute employ many more economists and journalists of non-American origin.

Much of the work of exporting the iron cages of American modernity was increasingly done, by the early 2000s, by foreign-born academics and think-tankers, who interfaced resourcefully between the elites of their ancestral and adopted countries. A prominent example of such intellectual synergy is Jagdish Bhagwati, in his own words the ‘world’s foremost free-trader’ and the godfather of India’s marketised economy. From his pulpit at Columbia University and the Council for Foreign Relations, Bhagwati and his disciples kept up a drumbeat of neo-liberal ideas arguing that no nation can advance without reining in labour unions, eliminating trade barriers, ending subsidies, etc.

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Even the terrorist attacks of 9/11 did not shake such convictions. The suspicion that ‘Islamo-fascism’ had declared war on liberalism actually roused many Anglo-American intellectuals into a bolder attempt to make the world over again in their preferred image of Anglo-America. Modernisation theorists, respectful of the longue durée in history, had entrusted the nurturing of democracy to middle-class beneficiaries of capitalism. But a ‘post-ideological’ generation of liberal internationalists as well as neocons now thought that democracy could be implanted through shock-and-awe therapy in societies that had no tradition of it.

In their dominant discourse, the racial and religious ‘other’ was either an irredeemable brute, the exact opposite of rationally self-interested Americans, to be exterminated universally through a relentless war on terror, or an American-style homo economicus who was prevented from pursuing his rational self-interest by his deficient political leaders and institutions. In the fantasy that drove the invasion and occupation of Iraq, freedom miraculously appears when the despotic state is emasculated and free markets, finally allowed to flourish, spontaneously harmonise individual interests and desires.

More importantly, the terrorist attacks on September 11 provoked an assertion of civilisational identity and solidarity, paving the way for more overt expressions of white supremacism. A small group of criminals and fanatics did not pose a mortal threat to the most powerful and wealthy societies in history. Nevertheless, the maniacal cries of ‘Allahu Akbar’ were met by a louder drumbeat of ‘Western values’ and confidence-building invocations of the West’s apparent quintessence, such as the Enlightenment. The collective affirmations of certain Western freedoms and privileges – ‘we must agree on what matters: kissing in public places, bacon sandwiches, disagreement, cutting-edge fashion’, Salman Rushdie wrote – became an emotional reflex. Susan Sontag seemed tactless to many in speaking of the ‘sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric’ of ‘confidence-building and grief management’ that resembled the ‘unanimously applauded, self-congratulatory bromides of a Soviet Party Congress’. She was attacked for insisting, ‘Let’s by all means grieve together, but let’s not be stupid together.’

Her warnings went unheeded. ‘I’m happy to be a laptop general,’ Paul Berman wrote in Terror and Liberalism, reprimanding those unwilling to join the new crusade for liberalism in the Middle East. During the Vietnam War, Hannah Arendt noted that members of the Democratic Administration had frequent recourse to phrases like ‘monolithic communism’ and ‘second Munich’ and deduced from this an inability ‘to confront reality on its own terms because they had always some parallels in mind that helped them to understand those terms’. Similarly, Berman, who wasn’t known previously for his expertise on modern political movements east of Europe, identified Islamism as a derivative version of the totalitarian enemies – fascism and communism – that liberalism had already fought throughout the twentieth century. After ‘trolling the Islamic bookstores of Brooklyn’, he offered a genealogy of ‘Islamism’ that rested almost entirely on his reading of Sayyid Qutb, an ideologue of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. According to Berman, liberal intellectuals were obliged to do battle with the new nihilistic fascism, which included secular dictatorships like Iraq’s as well as pan-Islamist movements. His laptop bombing quickly united a variety of public figures, from Richard Holbrooke to Martin Amis, in the cause.

Martin Amis published an essay on Islam and Islamism, which went on for more than 10,000 words without describing an individual experience of Muslim societies deeper than Christopher Hitchens’s acquisition of an Osama T-shirt in Peshawar and the Amis family’s failure to enter, after closing time, the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. ‘The impulse towards rational inquiry’, Amis asserted, ‘is by now very weak in the rank and file of the Muslim male.’ There were countless other startling claims (according to Amis, the army was on the Islamist side in the Algerian civil war) in his essay, whose pseudo-scholarship and fanatical conviction of moral superiority made it resemble nothing more than one of bin Laden’s desperately literary screeds.

Among the literati, big words like ‘Salafist totalitarianism’ and ‘Islamo-fascism’ helped project the illusion of profound knowledge. They also satisfied the nostalgic desire of some sedentary writers to see themselves in the avant-garde of a noble crusade against an evil ‘-ism’. The fervour of the ideologue manqué made no room for the sober fact that almost every nation state harbours a disaffected and volatile minority, whose size varies constantly in inverse relation to the alertness, tact and wisdom of the majority population.

It was a demoralising spectacle: talented writers nibbling on clichés picked to the bone by tabloid hacks, and a counterfeit imperial history and minatory visions of frenziedly breeding Muslims being enlisted in large-scale violence against voiceless peoples. But, as Niebuhr pointed out, the ‘men of culture’, with their developed faculty of reasoning, tend to ‘give the hysterias of war and the imbecilities of national politics more plausible excuses than the average man is capable of inventing’. As it happened, the ‘public conversation’ about Islam proposed by Amis was never held. Its terms had been set too low, and it came to be dominated by an isolated and vain chattering class that, all shook up by a changing world, sought to reassure themselves and us by digging an unbridgeable Maginot Line around our minds and hearts.

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Meanwhile, neo-imperialist assaults on Iraq and Afghanistan served to highlight the actual legacy of British imperialism: tribal, ethnic and religious conflicts that stifled new nation states at birth or doomed them to endless civil war punctuated by ruthless despotisms. Defeat and humiliation were compounded by the revelation that those charged with bringing civilisation from the West to the rest indulged – yet again – in indiscriminate murder and

Reviews for Bland Fanatics

[dilip1kumar-572329 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Like Pankaj Mishra's other books, this one too is trenchant, bitter, and disturbing. It demolishes the basis of any lingering sentiment that British rule was in any way good for India. However, like other such works, it seems to be too one-sided and self-serving, as there is no attempt to relate the British rule to what went before, and indeed, what came after: much of the structures, institutions, and processes founded by the British were found to be indispensable when it came to forging a modern state, not the least being the final annihilation and absorption of the 'native' or 'princely' states. Mishra, and others of this genre, can also be suspected of a certain cynical opportunism, as they ensconce themselves in pockets of comfort in the Western academe, while at the same time trashing the achievements of Western enlightenment, rationalism, liberal humanism, individual rights, rule of law and due process, responsible governance, civilized behavior in international conventions, and so on. In beautiful English, they denounce the gifts of English rule as poisoned and deadly, but obviously they have not the slightest interest in resorting to 'native' idioms or reverting to the pre-modern era in the political or social sphere. Five stars on language, three for the fallacies in their analysis and assessment.